Federal Inquiry Into Indian Firm Puts a Focus on Widespread Visa Abuses

A federal investigation into visa use by Infosys, the Indian technology outsourcing giant, has brought to light widespread abuses in the industry and prompted investigations into other foreign outsourcing firms, federal officials said Wednesday.

In the largest settlement ever in an immigration case, Infosys admitted no visa violations but agreed Wednesday to pay $34 million to resolve claims made by federal prosecutors in Texas.

The amount of the settlement was relatively small for Infosys, a Bangalore-based global enterprise with 160,000 employees worldwide and reported revenues of $7.9 billion, 70 percent of it from consulting in the United States. But the case added to intensifying legal scrutiny and political skepticism in the United States facing Indian companies that use temporary visas to bring in thousands of guest workers each year for technology and software jobs in American companies.

As part of the settlement, Infosys acknowledged major errors and omissions in records it kept on its employees in the United States, including Indian temporary technology workers brought in for contract work with American companies. But it did not admit to systematic fraud, and the agreement includes a point-by-point rebuttal of prosecutors’ accusations that it tried to increase profits by illegally using short-term business visitors’ visas to bring workers from India, instead of a more expensive and less accessible temporary employment visa, known as H-1B.

“This is not a settlement about systemic visa fraud,” Stephen A. Jonas of WilmerHale, the lead lawyer representing Infosys, said Wednesday after the settlement was made public by prosecutors in Plano, Tex., where Infosys has offices. “The company adamantly denies the visa abuse allegations. They are not true.”

But federal prosecutors and investigators insisted Wednesday that they had uncovered extensive misuse of visas at Infosys. They said they agreed to the settlement because Infosys had cooperated with the investigation and moved speedily to overhaul its record-keeping and improve its visa procedures.

“While Infosys is not admitting any wrongdoing, its leadership did appreciate there were substantial problems in the way they were conducting business in this country,” said John Malcolm Bales, the United States attorney for the Eastern District of Texas, in Plano. “We think they’ve cleaned up their act.”

Each year there is a scramble among technology companies for H-1B employment visas, because there is a basic annual cap of 65,000 visas. In the past three years, Infosys and two other Indian companies — Wipro and Tata Consultancy Services — were among the top five recipients of those visas, according to Ron Hira, a professor at Rochester Institute of Technology who studies the visa system.

The largest user, Cognizant, is an American company that brought in nearly 18,000 foreign workers, almost all from India, Mr. Hira said.

American technology companies have been clamoring for an increase in H-1B visas, saying they face shortages of Americans with advanced skills. A large increase was part of broad immigration legislation that passed the Senate in June, and there is also a measure to raise the limits before the House of Representatives. But the Senate bill also included new protections for Americans that would make it more difficult for foreign outsourcing companies to bring in temporary workers.

It is not clear whether Congress will take further action on those bills this year.

In recent years Congress has sharply raised visa fees for foreign outsourcing companies while immigration authorities imposed new regulations to limit the movement of foreign technology workers in the United States.

“In the past few years there has been a real assault by the federal government on the information technology consulting industry, and it has hit the Indian companies particularly hard,” said Avram Morell, an immigration lawyer in New York.

Infosys has vigorously disputed the government’s accusations. Mr. Jonas, the company’s lawyer, said the government had failed to prove that foreign workers on business visitor visas, known as B-1, were doing any work that was not authorized under their visas. He said no evidence had emerged that any foreign workers ever remained in the United States after their visas had expired.

Since 2011, Infosys put in place new record-keeping and visa procedures and later placed new limitations on the activities in the United States of B-1 visitor visa holders, improvements that were acknowledged in the settlement.

But federal investigators said Wednesday that they had uncovered numerous cases in which Infosys had brought in Indian workers on B-1 visas, to do work not allowed under that visa. Investigators from the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security examined 6,500 B-1 visas Infosys had used to bring in Indian workers over five years.

“The vast majority were illegitimate,” said George M. Nutwell, a special agent in charge of the State Department Diplomatic Security Service in Houston. Investigators went to the American companies where the B-1 workers were placed and discovered they were doing programming and technology engineering work similar to H-1B workers. The business visitor visa is primarily for attending training sessions and meetings, not for work.

The disaster called Obamacare may be the best thing for American techies in a long time. Its implementation is being increasingly linked to slumdog sweatshops and Indian outsourcers. First came the Huffington Post, in this article:

CHICAGO- While everyone debates the policy points of ObamaCare, few understand that billions of dollars in IT contracts are wrapped inside the law. To meet federal mandates, states must upgrade their legacy Medicaid Management Information Systems (MMIS). These IT contracts are some of the largest awards in state history.

Last week, Illinois Governor Patrick Quinn became national news for circumventing a three year procurement process on up to $190 million in no-bid IT contracts. Now we find that one of the largest bid-contract MMIS awards will outsource state jobs to India.

In June, Illinois Governor Patrick Quinn's administration awarded a ten year $71.4 million staffing contract to Cognizant Technology Solutions. Cognizant ranks in the national top 10 for procuring H-1B visa workers. Evidence shows that the company is staffing operational headquarters in Chennai and Bangalore, India for the Illinois work...

Then The Atlantic piled on with an article entitled "Behind the 'Bad Indian Coder'" that, while not directly related to Healthcare.gov, was timely:

“Code from India can be truly awful if you work with most companies,” another Redditor said. “A lot of them treat programming as a task to be completed with numbers and fire those that can't work fast enough, rather than a task requiring quality where people are educated to avoid mistakes and fired only as a last resort.”

“I am currently working with outsourced code,” said another. “I never knew how bad it could get.”

The thread bounced around nerd circles for a bit before dying down, but it was just the latest example of the perennial grumbling by American programmers who are assigned to work on code that was crafted in Delhi or Mumbai. Indeed, as America has increasingly relied on Indians to program our software on the cheap, we’ve also increasingly griped that cultural differences seem to penetrate even the formulas and algorithms that one would think would be the same in every country.

A few years ago, American web developer John Larson wrote that outsourcing code has caused him, among other woes:

real-time communication made inconvenient and response times made long by the time zone difference,

a reduced sense of accountability, commitment and partnership inherent in the long distance relationship,

and text like “Link will be sent to your mail for to update your Password.” sprinkled throughout public facing parts of the website, which just doesn’t give your customers the best impression of you and your business.

The accusations often incite Indian developers to jump in to defend themselves. Sri Rangan, a developer from Delhi, said he was offended by the Reddit thread, arguing that a combination of living conditions, education, and the country’s economic structure handicaps Indian developers so severely that they can’t be expected to compete with 26-year-old Stanford graduates.

He points out that while American coders ride private, Wi-Fi-equipped shuttles to work, their Indian counterparts sometimes commute hours to their city-center jobs from slum areas. And for much of India’s recent history, working in IT and software development was the surest ticket out of poverty, so the field likely attracted some young people who were more interested in simply putting food on the table than perfecting recursions.

“Maybe, just maybe, there could be a correlation between quality of life and quality of work?” Rangan wrote.

Meanwhile, problems are always bound to arise when a crucial chunk of a company’s workforce operates off-site, as Marissa Mayer might attest, especially when there are time zones and linguistic barriers at play.

Indian coders, it seems, have partly become victims of their own success—offering such a good deal to American CEOs to do a job just as well (or at least almost as well) as similarly-trained Americans, that their code has become pervasive. Over the past few decades, Indian programmers have done everything from create a virtual Oscar figure for the 2004 Academy Awards to ensure the millennium bug wouldn’t kill us all at the end of 1999. With so much Indian output powering our technology, some of the work is bound to be sub-par.

“Working with legacy code, regardless of how well it is written, will always be a challenge,” Rangan wrote.

When Vasu Kulkarni, an entrepreneur who grew up in India but went to college at the University of Pennsylvania, launched his online sports-analytics company in the U.S. a few years ago, the entire development team was initially based in Bangalore. Recently, though, he closed down his entire India office and moved all the programming onshore...

It’s another slap in the face to American software engineers, two of the main companies that implemented the faulty crashing Obamacare exchanges – Infosys and Cognizant – are American subsidiaries of Indian body shopper and outsourcing companies. In fact, Cognizant and Infosys were the top users of H-1B visas in America. The H-1B visa, the visa which allows low level Indian programmers with fake degrees to get US citizenship, is used to throw better qualified American engineers into the streets or drive down pay. Imagine if we fought the high cost of doctors salaries by bringing in 577,428 (the number of H-1B applications approved in 2012) Indian doctors who took a two week course and worked for 20 dollars an hour.

The GAO has conducted three studies of the H-1B visa and each time found extensive fraud in more than 25% of all applications. And that was only obvious fraud in depth examination would probably expose that many of these applicants either had no degree at all or went to a dubious or fraudulent fly by night university. Even if they have a valid degree often their entire resumes are falsified. So many companies that have fired their American engineers and replaced them with cheaper Indian programmers find out all too fast that they either go bankrupt or struggle (Dell is the latest case in point). (Note: Xerox was one of the few American companies which was awarded work as well)

Infosys was awarded the 50 million Washington DC exchange contract and at least four other states. With defense work slowing, the Indian companies are making a big push to own the exchanges as these promise work for years. But there’s a problem. Programming the exchanges is quite complicated, involving interfacing with legacy Medicare systems and if not done correctly they may seem to work but fall apart as soon as large numbers of users begin using them...

Speaking of Infosys, it appears that some people are SUING THE SHIT OUT OF THEM:

A class-action lawsuit filed in August against Infosys, alleging that the company has engaged in systematic, company-wide discrimination against Americans and others who are not of South Asian descent, has been amended to include two former Infosys employees, and a contractor working under Infosys’s management, who have come forward to allege that they, too, suffered discrimination.

As I wrote at the time, the original lawsuit, filed on Aug. 1 in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin, was brought on behalf of Brenda Koehler, an American IT project manager in Milwaukee who was allegedly denied employment at Infosys because she is not of South Asian descent. The lawyers who filed it were subsequently contacted by two former Infosys employees who gave similar accounts of discrimination: Layla Bolten, a software analysis and testing specialist in Dickerson, Md.; and Gregory Handloser, a sales manager in Sarasota, Fla. Also contacting the lawyers was contractor Kelly Parker, an IT help desk support specialist in Minocqua, Wis. The lawyers amended the lawsuit to include the allegations from these individuals, and filed it on Sept. 27...

It looks like Infoshit and their pack of rabid slumdogs are set to rid Northeast Utilities of all the American techies:

Northeast Utilities brings on H-1B workers

By Patrick Thibodeau

Created Sep 27 2013 - 2:23pm

Connecticut state lawmakers held a press conference Thursday demanding answers from Northeast Utilities about its unofficial plans to ship IT jobs to India. This press conference was mostly wind and fury. The state may have lost its leverage over NU when it put its stamp on a merger last year.

At this press conference, State Rep. Lonnie Reed, who chairs the state’s Energy Committee, said that during the merger talks with Boston-based NStar, NU “promised not to do any layoffs, but to do it through attrition, and to let us know in advance,” Reed said, according to a report in the New Haven Register[1]. “There is a process in place and they have not adhered to it. That just undermines their credibility,” she said, according to the newspaper.

This helps to explain NU’s heads-up to employees about its offshore plans. (See: Utility sets IT department on path to self-destruction [2].) NU management knows this is the kind of news that will prompt IT employees to rush to the exits. Accelerating attrition, and dismantling the IT workforce through fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD), is probably easier than bringing lawmakers news of a layoff.

But what is actually going on inside of NU IT?

So far this year, Infosys, the Bangalore, India-based IT services giant, has filed about 30 Labor Condition Applications (LCAs) with the U.S. Dept. of Labor, according to the records kept by MyVisaJobs.com. LCAs are filed with the Labor Dept. for wage determinations. H-1B visa holders work in the U.S. on temporary visas and have to be paid the prevailing wage...

The new lawsuit, filed on Aug. 1 in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin, was brought on behalf of Brenda Koehler, an American IT project manager in Milwaukee who, the suit alleges, was denied employment at Infosys because she is not of South Asian descent. According to the complaint, “this matter is a class action with an amount in controversy of greater than $5 million.” Daniel Kotchen of Kotchen & Low LLP in Washington, D.C., lead counsel on the legal team that filed the lawsuit, was adamant about the egregiousness of Infosys’s actions.

“We are convinced there are very serious issues with Infosys,” Kotchen said. “We believe strongly in the case, and we look forward to prosecuting it...”

Tennant was a shill for the slumdog slave trade until insurgents hounded him into reporting the truth about the curry scented wage pirates. He was doing extensive coverage about the Jay Palmer case, and recently blogged about it in regards to the latest case:

It’s been almost two-and-a-half years since I began covering the remarkable case of Jay Palmer, the Infosys employee from Alabama who summoned the courage to blow the whistle on alleged visa fraud at the Indian IT services provider. Those allegations would prompt grand jury subpoenas and spark a multi-agency investigation of Infosys’s conduct by the U.S. government.

Beyond the government investigation, it was evident from the outset that the case would have far-reaching consequences. The first of many times I would interview Kenny Mendelsohn, Palmer’s attorney, was in March, 2011. Among the questions I asked Mendelsohn in that very first interview was this one: “Do you think there's a case for a class-action lawsuit by U.S technology workers who believe visa fraud is depriving them of job opportunities, because positions are being filled by people working here under fraudulent circumstances?”

There was a pause, and then Mendelsohn responded in his slow, Alabama drawl.

“I haven't really studied it. In the back of my mind, it makes me think there could be,” he said, clearly intrigued by the question. “I haven't really gathered all the factual information or ever focused on it. But as you ask the question about class action, I'm thinking maybe there is a potential there...”

This lawsuit may have legs and may be the final nail in the coffin for Infosys.

Grant Gross, a worthy insurgent, has also covered the story at ComputerWorld. The Wall Street Journal, that notorious pro-slumdog publication, has even picked up the story, in an article written of course by some Desi writer. Slashdot is on the case, as is much of the IT media.

Readers of this blog should be familiar with the name Sarvesh Dharayan, head of the notorious bodyshop Apex Technology Group Incorporated. He first surfaced as "Shawn Gibson", threatening me and several other insurgents because one of his slumdogs had exposed details about his illegal activity regarding H-1Bs and we had spread the word. He then hired mob-lawyer Patrick Papalia to harass me. Eventually, Sarvesh got a corrupt judge (probably with a bribe) named James P. Hurley (who promptly retired) to shut down a few insurgent blogs, including mine. This Desi pimp and his dumbass wop lawyer went to great lengths to try to shut me down, and I had to host the blog in other countries, first Panama, then Canada, and finally Malaysia, its current home.

Well Karma is a bitch, and it seems to have bit Sarvesh in the ass. He was just arrested in connection with a $2.3 million bribery and kickback scheme, which was reported to me by one of my readers just yesterday. I finished reading the complaint filed by the feds, and it is a sordid story. It involves some unnamed New York company involved with Medicare and the HHS, who was scammed by one of its executives who was getting kickbacks for placing slumdogs from Apex at the company.

Like I have always said, there is no way entire IT departments can be filled with illiterate slumdogs without some corrupt collaborator getting a cut of the action. This is the classic MO of slumdog slave traders -- kickback a cut of the hourly billing (which in this case appears to be about $105-$115) to the collaborator, net about $65, and pay the slumdog probably about half that. Shit, I make about $80/hr after my agency gets its cut of probably a similar rate, so Sarvesh was making a fucking killing.

Sarvesh Dharayan (aka Sarvesh Kumar Dharayan) has been busy lately. He recently tried to get on the school board, probably to obtain more political connections and further his schemes. It also looks like he was trying to buy political influence by making some healthy contributions to N.J. Governor Christie.

Finally, this fat Desi fuck is on Facebook (or he has a Facebook page, because he is probably in jail currently).

I am an Indian Programmer/developer/IT guy. I can contribute my story and hope its relevant. The beginning of my career is typical. I am bachelors in Electrical Engineering. I always 'liked' electricity. I did not have a computer till I was 20 something. I did have lots of broken electronics though and used to make little hobby circuits. I did not design the circuits but copied them from magazines/books. I kind of understood why they worked but not really. I always wanted to 'get it'. My questions which were not explained in the text books in school remained unanswered. Teachers did not seem to know the answers. Abstract concepts were pushed down my throat as hard reality with no other possibilities. Accepting them was the only way to get 'good marks'. I had no access to internet (or a computer during school) but my dad bought me as much books as he could afford. I used to like Maths in beginning and was good at it but got stuck on square root of 2: irrationals, their importance etc. and other higher level abstractions in school. The access to the books I had or the Teachers did not clear things up. I always knew inside I was an idiot. I was achieving decent scores/grades and was considered an excellent student because I realised the only path given to me was to memorize tons of information in stupidly written text books . The examination questions are from the same text books, even patterns of the Math problems. So to really apply myself to 'succeed' was never really needed. Its hard to keep my tone normal and objective because the truth is the Education system is horrible. It like turning human beings into'hard disks' and not critically thinking/questioning conscious beings. Indians I feel are not genetically predisposed to being idiots but the Education system is designedto leave no other option. I do not know exactly how this came to be, but probably it was modelled on accepting West to be the creators and us the consumers of knowledge. No questions asked. Then I got into an engineering college and took up Electrical Engineering for four years. In a nutshell,a joke: The teachers, the books,the labs: everything from the middle ages and that when my college is considered internally and even internationally to be a good one! It was the same script as school: spend most time eating rubbish books for breakfast, lunch and dinner. I was amazed all the time how students, teachers all around me had no problems with this. My dad advised to go trough this mill to have a degree to get a Job then find your own way. If you don’t have a degree, you are ffed. So that is what I did instead of dropping out.I found majority of my fellow students did not care about physics, maths, computers.. anything really, just dreamt of joining companies like TCS, Infosys etc and keptcramming their previous interview questions sheets etc as we approached end of our Engineering degree. Only care seems to be about Getting a job, cars, home, the girl/guy to settle down with, going f..kin 'onsite' is the dream. Political, intellectually shallow players built for corporate. I couldn’t compete with them and still have a job in India on my own terms. When the software companies started coming in to college, I was selected by the first one and shipped to Chennai. They did not mind at all that I was an Electrical engineer and potentially knew nothing about computers. They asked me nothing about computers in the interview, just some logic questions. What mattered was that I just awesomely happy about the peanuts they were offering me in return. But peanuts they are in hindsight, At that moment I remember I was the happiest man alive. It was amazing, wow, superman moment, I forgot that I was an idiot. I thought I was kewl.This company put me straight in to Cobol,DB2 based project for a major US client. I hated Cobol , did not know the business,did know Cobol! but that seemed not to matter! I managedsomehow and kept pushing my managers to get me into some Java project. All around me were absolute idiot developers and managers even more so, all worried about keeping up a façade of competence for the big American Gods and worried about their next onsite visits where they can earn a bit of money. We are all just clueless there and since everyone is clueless whatever requirement gets funnelled down from the client has to be taken verbatim as there is no context,thinking,confidence in self. Because everyone is clueless about everything, they agree for peanuts. That is how the companies make profits. That is why they hired me(an Electrical engg) straight from college after a joke of an interview. That is what they still do. I had no idea of the environment, the money involved or any other kind of international exposure. I was very happy in my new microcosm: A shared room with 3 other guys in a shitty place in a shitty city and not be a burden on my parents any more. I jumped companies, for higher salaries at each jump. I kept learning about computers myself as I had the money now to buy better books and internet. I finally jumped countries to the first world and joined a start up. I now kind of have a better idea now finally what an irrational number is. This country enabled me to see. My brain works differently here, works better. Kids are being kept stupid in India to serve as fodder for out sourcing firms. The stupidity level is fine tuned such that with things like stackoverflow you can write some business application level 'if else' statements + have everything else handled by someone else's libraries. The one genius guy I met in India left to work for our space program and now why is he being paid a nothingness to what I am earning here now!?Why should I go back to India and do something about all this? And if all the slightly conscious ones are pushed outside of India, who teaches back there?You can see now why Indian management chains build up: Top managers like Indian managers as they do not ask uncomfortable questions. The Indian managers themselves in turn know Indian sub managers will be the same. All thanks to our Education system. You have to think how exceptional are the good Indian programmers who face this huge ball of slime that is Indian Education and still succeed internationally.Indian IT is generally a nut job and all you have are some exceptions holding it up. Take away the libraries, the frameworks, then see what can come out of India in its current state: Nothing. What good is it when the whole country becomes a façade: India does not create new. It would be hard to justify how this fact(well fact in my world) helps the human Earth overall when a major chunk of its population are onsite opportunities chasing zombies.

That pretty much sums of the reality of slumdog coders. And there is over a decade worth of their shitting code around, so American techies should be busy for the next 20 years or so cleaning up their crap.

"But in the broader IT market, the environment is more like manufacturing, with less-skilled Americans being replaced by cheaper foreign labor. The largest employers of H1-B workers aren’t firms like Facebook and Microsoft, they are actually outsourcing companies like Infosys, Tata, and Wipro. These companies account for around half of the annual H-1B workers, and the majority of their employees are overseas, according to a recent report from Computerworld. The study found that less than three percent of H-1B workers apply for permanent residency. Most learn the job, then leave to continue the job from their home country."

I am starting to do some recreational interviewing again and a recruiter was trying to get me into Hyundai. Normally those are the type of gigs I would be interested in, but this one sounded fishy. Sure enough, I got this email from the agent:

You will be on a call tomorrow with Vijay Mehta (Project Manager) and Rajesh, his Lead Architect. Rajesh will be talking during most of the interview cause he will be asking most of the technical questions.

I attached a document with my notes from a phone screen I listened to. Below, you will also see questions from another phone interview we listened into as well. I’d rather give you too much, and I’m hoping you won’t be blind-sided.

Good luck tomorrow! Please give me a call after the interview.

Carlo

OMG!!!!! Two slumdogs and the agent is sneaking me the questions? WTF?

Here is what I sent him this morning:

Sorry, this is not going to work. Just between you and me, I don't think this is a good cultural fit. I've worked in shops dominated by Indians, and it has never worked out well. They don't share my work ethic, and I don't like being treated like a slave. The communication problems are just the beginning. It is a very hierarchical, nepotistic environment and Anglos like me don't do well in such a workplace.

Send me a req where I am not the token white boy and we can talk. No hard feelings.

He's already called me twice this morning and I had to tell him about all my slumdog horror stories. He was really desperate. But fuck it, those two slumdogs and their cracker collaborator boss can take a hike.

Prolific blogger and honorary insurgent has seen fit to comment on my recent post. His post is excellent:

Via the “Tunnel Rat”‘s excellent High Tech Insurgent website. Tunnel Rat is a fine US IT worker, currently slaving at a Hindu-infested US IT firm. His identity is a closely held secret. He is widely hated by Hindu Indian H-1B job thieves and their parasitical cheering section, which sadly includes much of the US Left, of all people.

The US IT worker is an icon, a dying icon, dying like the buffalo exterminated on the US plains. A traitor class of US upper middle class and upper class managerial and corporate elite have conspired to kill the best and the brightest of US minds, our great IT workers, by importing vast numbers of Hindus to steal their jobs.

C.Z. Nnaemeka has a great essay that touches on America's obsession with worthless apps, Wall Street get-rich-quick schemes, and the hi-tech junta's tendency to ship in indentured servants from India instead of training and utilizing the millions of veterans, single mothers, middle-aged, and Appalachian rednecks. She sums it up nicely here:

...Meet the people who have the indignity of being over 50 and finding themselves suddenly jobless. These are the Untouchables of the new American workforce: 3+ decades of employment and experience have disqualified them from ever seeing a regular salary again. Once upon a time, some modicum of employer noblesse oblige would have ensured that loyal older workers be retained or at the very least retrained, MBA advice be damned. But, “A bas les vieux!” the fancy consultants cried, and out went those who were ‘no longer fresh.’ As Taylor Swift would put it, corporate America and the Boomer worker “are never ever getting back together.” Instead bring in the young, the childless, the tech-savvy here in America, and the underpaid and quasi-indentured abroad willing to work for slightly north of nothing in the kinds of conditions we abolished in the 19th century.

For, in the 21stcentury, a prosperous American business is a soaring 2-storied cake: 1 management layer at top thick with perks, golden parachutes, stock options, and a total disregard for those beneath them; 1 layer below of increasingly foreign workers (If you’re lucky, you trained these people before you were laid off!), who can’t even depend on their jobs because as we speak, those sameself consultants – but no one that we know of course — are scouring the globe for the cheapest labor opportunities, fulfilling their promise that no CEO be left behind...

This is a great read, and I recommend it to all those interested in hearing a shocking indictment of Silicon Valley, Wall Street, VCs, academia, MBAs, and the rest of the collaborators that have colluded with the likes of Vikek Wadhwa to promote the denigration, displacement, and discrimination of the American IT worker.

Disclaimer
The thoughts expressed on this blog may or may not be the author's own and are protected
by the 1st Amendment. Any attempt to reveal his identity by contacting a slumdog
hack at Google, or a corrupt Desi sys-admin at his ISP will be dealt with promptly
and severely. Civil and criminal penalties may apply if one is found to have used
private information in an attempt to get the author fired at the Hindu-only I.T.
ghetto he currently works at. In addition, any Desi who attempts to burn the author's
house down because they are enraged over his writing will be prosecuted to the fullest
extent of the law. This isn't India.